The Hot Seat: Gore Vidal

By John Preston

December 16, 2006 — 11.00am

Midway through my conversation with Gore Vidal I ask him if he has ever in his life felt socially inferior to anyone. Down the phone line from Los Angeles comes an incredulous popping sound followed by a familiar honeyed drawl. "That really would be the trick of the week, wouldn't it? Inferior? No, why should I?"

At 81, Vidal is confined to a wheelchair these days. But while his voice may be more frail and his famous quiff less magisterial, he can still do queenly hauteur like no one else. As the critic John Lahr once wrote, "No one pisses from the height that Vidal does." In Vidal's latest book, a memoir entitled Point to Point Navigation, he adroitly skewers old adversaries such as Truman Capote, mere mention of whom makes him sound as if battery acid has dripped onto his tongue ("Let's not go into that swampland") and Tennessee Williams.

Of Williams, he writes that his paranoia was "like a great bunch of bougainvillea". Yet Vidal hardly seems immune to paranoia himself, having spent a lifetime prosecuting an immense number of feuds with promiscuous relish. He, however, doesn't see it that way. "I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones."

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"Who are they?" I ask.

"Oh," he says, and here it's all too easy to imagine a hand flicking disdainfully, "they're too numerous to mention. I think I have a normal threshold of anger but it's true that I am by nature belligerent." He pauses and then adds with a lightly cadenced yet unmistakeable note of threat: "The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted."

Although Vidal's output as a writer has been prodigious - 25 novels, six plays and 11 volumes of essays - the pleasures of art, and indeed of sex, are as nothing compared with the delights of going to the movies, he says. His own life and that of the cinema have been linked from the beginning. Vidal claims he started to talk at a cinema in 1929 when, aged four, he strode down the aisle to speak to the actress on screen. Then, in the 1950s, he became the last contract writer to be hired by MGM. With the English playwright Christopher Fry, he was put to work on Ben-Hur, salvaging a "ghastly" script.

"I remember the first scene I had to work on was where Mrs Ben Hur and other female Hurs were standing around in the Valley of the Lepers complaining about their skin. Then someone shouts, 'Look, here comes a holy man who they're going to crucify - let's go and watch.' We cut to JC walking up the road, 'bathed in an effulgent light', as the original writer memorably put it. Then, as Christ passes by, the women's leprosy miraculously gets better.

"Christopher, who was something of a rationalist, said he couldn't work out why Christ should cure them. After all, he had never met the Hur women before and, besides, they weren't even Christians. I told him that one shouldn't pry too deeply into mysteries like that, but still he kept saying that there had to be a reason for it. In the end I said, 'Think of Him as Christ the Dermatologist.' In effect, these women were asking, 'What should I do about my skin, doctor?' And Christ, like all dermatologists, was saying, 'It's your nerves, dear' - whereupon, as happens in every skin clinic in America, they were instantly cured."

Did he ever worry that working in movies might damage his reputation as a serious novelist? "I never gave a goddamn about my reputation," he snaps. "My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, if you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage."

For Vidal, Hollywood represented a new social arena to be conquered: a place where he could be seen and where, with his nostrils flared in disdainful awe, he could gaze upon the gods and goddesses of his age. Some, like Greta Garbo, even became friends, although, as Vidal concedes: "I was aware that the relationship really only worked one way. As far as Garbo was concerned, I was always a kind of termite wandering through the woodwork. But that was all right; I didn't mind being a termite for a while.

"Garbo was very peasanty, very literal, very earthy and very funny. I would bump into her in Klosters every morning while out shopping. I once inquired what she bought and she said she bought pullovers. What, every day? Yes, yes, she said, only pullovers. But how many do you have? I asked. And with a note of pride in her voice she told me, 'I have every pullover the Swiss make."'

As Vidal heads towards what he calls "the door marked Exit", so too does the species he represents: the famous writer. Nowadays, writers simply aren't famous any more - or, rather, "to speak of a famous writer is like speaking of a famous speedboat designer. The adjective is inappropriate to the noun."

The reasons for this are twofold, Vidal believes. "The French auteur theory of the 1950s had a lot to do with it. People who might have written books started trying to make movies instead. I remember all these terrible hacks in Hollywood coming up and telling me, 'I'm an auteur, you know.' And I would say, 'I always knew you were by the way you parted your hair.'

"Also, the GI Bill of Rights after the war meant that milllions of people who had never been educated before went to university. The trouble was they liked it so much they decided to stay there and become academics. And if you want to meet someone who really hates literature, then just talk to an academic."

While Vidal's life has been rich in incident, it has been oddly lacking in intimacy - or so it would appear to the outsider. As he puts it, he has "always made a distinction between one's friends and one's sex life".

When I ask him why, he says: "Sex is very easily defined and friendship is almost impossible to define. Why blur them?"

But surely friendship isn't that hard to define?

"Ah," he sighs. "I think it's different in England."

Vidal lived with his partner, Howard Auster, for 53 years until Auster's death from cancer three years ago. They lived first in the house they shared in Ravello on the Amalfi Coast and more latterly in Los Angeles. Yet they never had sex. Had this always been part of the deal?

"Our relationship was what it was. A sexual relationship was the last thing I wanted. When I was 17 or 18 it was different; I used to become besotted with people. But by then I felt past all that."

Vidal is a little more forthcoming in Point to Point Navigation, where he describes how "each had a sex life apart from the other: all else including our sovereign, Time, was shared".

But it wasn't until Auster lay dying that they ever kissed on the lips. Then when Auster did die, Vidal writes of envying the nurse who burst into tears. As for him, he remained outwardly unmoved. "The WASP glacier had closed over my head" - a remark that recalls Erica Jong's observation that Vidal was the coldest and saddest man she had ever met.

It's tempting to see Vidal's contentiousness as a kind of curdled intimacy; locking horns with people bringing a closeness of sorts. Possibly he has never liked his sexual nature very much, which might explain why he has always insisted that there's no connection between anybody's sexuality and their identity.

"But surely you would be a very different person if you were heterosexual?" I say.

"How do you know? I don't think I would have been any different. Tennessee Williams slept with women until he was 28. Then he changed but he didn't just become another person."

So you don't believe in such a thing as "a gay sensibility"?

Vidal gives an audible shudder. "If you believed in that you'd have to believe in a heterosexual sensibility and heaven only knows what that would be like."

Partly because Vidal does not seem like someone who spends a lot of time brooding on his shortcomings, I ask him what he thinks his biggest failing is. There is a long pause. Then, suddenly sounding a lot stronger than before and speaking with great deliberation, he says: "Giving interviews."

Telegraph, London

Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal is published by Little, Brown, $49.95.